AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview

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Total System Power Consumption

Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the AMD A8-3850 and some competing platforms. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power this new APU was consuming with a power meter, versus other test systems we used for benchmarks in the previous pages. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling on the desktop and while under a heavy workload Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet and not the the individual CPUs or GPUs alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

The A8-3850's power consumption characteristics when paired with an A75-based motherboard are fairly impressive. Idle power consumption is simply minuscule--we're talking about a quad-core processor here with 400 Radeon cores (plus RAM, drives, a PSU, fans, etc.) sucking down only 51-55 watts at idle. And under load (where we taxed both the CPU and GPU with concurrent runs of Cinebench and LAME) total system power consumption hovered right around 150W, which is competitive with the Core i5-2500.